30 Things I Learned From Buffy the Vampire Slayer...And 30 Things I Learned From Twilight

Note: I originally wrote this piece (and posted it to facebook) when I was 18. I was going to modify it and post it here, but after reading it over I decided to post it as I originally wrote it. Even though some of the writing makes me wince, I think it's an interesting window into the mindset of a teenager who had watched Buffy and read Twilight. I first saw Buffy when I was 13, and I finished it when I was 17. I read all four Twilight books when I was 18. Here, completely unedited (*wince*) is a teenage girl's perspective on Buffy and Twilight. 

Right. So I read all four Twilight books. I even enjoyed them, more or less. And mostly I think they're harmless, if shallow. But recently I started re-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I remembered what a real heroine is supposed to look and act like. I know I'm going to tick some people off, but...well, it's me. You should be expecting it. If you disagree with any/all of the points on either list, I challenge to come up with a negative list for Buffy and a positive one for Twilight. Go for it. Just remember: Buffy would slay Edward Cullen in two seconds, after she told him how stupid his hair looked.

What I Learned From Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

1. It’s possible to be functional AND fashionable.

2. You can’t control whom you fall in love with, but you can control whether or not you let that love consume you.

3. Friends and family should be the two most important things in your world, and often they’re the same people.

4. Nothing is set in stone.

5. Never use the phrase ‘you can’t do X, you haven’t got the balls.’ You will inevitably have your balls sliced, diced, and julienned by a very pissed off Slayer.

6. Girls can kick ass, and guys can cook, clean, and talk about their feelings.

7. There is definitely such an entity as too much of a good thing.

8. Respect your parents and the lessons they taught you—even if that means knocking them out and locking them in a closet. 

9. Lies will always come back to haunt you. Sometimes literally.

10. Whenever you think you’ve run out of choices, there’s always another option. Always.

11. Humans can be monstrous, and monsters can be humane.

12. Never judge on appearance. This can get you killed.

13. Wear the right shoes.

14. When you hear creepy music playing, it’s not a good idea to walk towards it.

15. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

16. Know the rules, so you know how to break them.

17. You really, really don’t want to know what your parents were like when they were your age.

18. The hardest part of being in this world is living in it. Still, it’s better than the alternative.

19. Come up with some snappy lines about your adversary’s hair and fashion choices. When your life is in danger you can throw these quips at them and confound them so you can escape or regroup.

20. Don’t mess with lesbians. They WILL kick your ass.

21. There’s no such thing as good or bad voices, so sing no matter how silly you think you sound.

22. It is possible for a girl—or guy—to fall in love with people of both genders. It’s not wrong, and she wasn’t lying to herself the entire time. It’s called bisexuality. Look it up.

23. Don’t be afraid to speak up when someone’s hurting you—otherwise people you love might end up getting hurt too.

24. There is a huge difference between martyrdom and suicide. And it isn’t press coverage.

25. It’s always the quiet ones. Always.

26. Don’t trust doctors. Or anyone who calls his or herself ‘doctor’. In fact, if you see someone coming down the street who looks like they might be a doctor, it’s probably best to run the other way.

27. That being said, basic emergency response skills can come in handy.

28. Being a superhero is not as easy or glamorous as the Wonder Twins made it look.

29. Sometimes it works to play by the rules, and sometimes you need to grab the chessboard and throw it on the floor.

30. People deserve to be treated with respect regardless of age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, or fashion choices.

  

What I Learned From Twilight:

1. It’s noble to do something that makes you miserable to help another person, even when the other person doesn’t want you to.

2. You won’t be happy unless you’re ‘mated for life.’

3. Sex before marriage is a big no-no

4. Let the menfolk do the fishin’ and huntin,’ and the womenfolk do the cookin’ and the cleanin.’

5. If a woman is outgoing, opinionated, and unafraid to stand up for herself, she’s a cold-hearted bitch.

6. Don’t spend time worrying needlessly about the evil vampires coming to kill you. A Deux ex Machina will descend from the sky in a cloud of fluffy bunnies and save the day at the last minute.

7. When a guy kidnaps you, keeps you hostage in his house, and forbids you seeing your friends it isn’t a clear indicator of emotional abuse. He just wants what’s best for you.

8. There’s no such thing as being overprotective. He’s the guy, he knows best.

9. It is possible to have hours and hours of conversation about nothing except how beautiful you and your boyfriend are.

10. When a guy tells you he’s been hanging out in your room watching you, the proper response is to smile and feel all gooey inside.

11. Romeo and Juliet are good role models.

12. When someone you love dies, you, too, should die. There’s no point in living anyways.

13. Once you fall for a guy, nothing is more important than him. Nothing. Not your family, not your friends, and certainly not your personal safety and self-respect.

14. You should totally reassure him that’s it’s okay when he hurts you.

15. Women are obsessed with babies. They all want them.

16. Calling all your friends and family together and asking them to die to save one person’s life isn’t selfish, it’s…strategic.

17. There’s no such thing as platonic love—the only true love is the love a man feels for a woman. Hmm, that means no homosexuals either.

18. You should become so attached to a guy you sink into a state of catatonia when he leaves you, because, as has already been pointed out, he is THE ONLY ONE THAT MATTERS.

19. Men like to do things like practice medicine, fight in the army, and hunt wild animals. Women like to do things like draw, pick out nice outfits for everyone, and obsess over babies.

20. If there’s one woman doing a job usually reserved for men, she should be treated like an outsider and regarded as a freak. It builds character. Really.

21. Love at first sight isn’t only possible, it’s inevitable. Getting to know a person doesn’t matter at all.

22. It’s okay to string two men (or women) along and tell them you love them both, as long as they understand you don’t want to hurt them.

23. “I fell down the stairs” is always a good excuse. It works in all sorts of situations.

24. When a boy tells you he doesn’t love you, he’s lying. Keep waiting, he’ll come back. I promise.

25. A girl can do anything she wants to do—as long as her boyfriend approves.

26. Keep secrets. Lots of secrets. In fact, make your entire life a lie. This won’t hurt anyone and will make you a better person.

27. If a guy forces you to do something you don’t want to do, don’t tell your parents. They’ll probably just laugh and side with the guy.

28. Don’t try to stop the evil, murderous government. Just worry about saving your boy/girlfriend. I’m sure those innocent men, women, and children will be fine.

29. If you feel different, alone, unique, and isolated from your peers, it’s because you really are that special. It has nothing to do with the fact that you’re a teenager.

30. It’s much better to get married and murdered at 18 than to spend a few years exploring the world and discovering who you are. After all, nothing matters more than outward beauty. Inward beauty is meaningless.

Bottom line: Buffy saved the world by creating an army of super-powered girls and kicking some demon a**. Bella saved…well, some people, by….making a big bubble. Who are you going to pick as your role model? 

Proceed With Caution: A Review of Blink and Caution

When I started Tim Wynne-Jones's Blink and Caution, I was wary because I'd heard so many people praise the YA novel--especially for its 2nd person narrator. For the first half of the story, I was convinced that everyone was dead wrong, and that Blink and Caution was far from a success--it was a slow, rambling, often disjointed story that overindulged in a kind of Francesca Lia Block-type wordplay. It was only once the main characters met up and their stories intertwined that the novel really picked up, and even managed to change my mind by the end--not only could I see why Blink and Caution had been lauded with so much praise by children's librarians and organizations such as Horn Book, but I actually enjoyed the story.

Despite my enjoyment of Blink and Caution, I couldn't stop thinking about it from a writer's perspective, and under that lens the book was something of a hot mess--but from a reader's perspective it completely succeeds. Here's my completely biased attempt to work through my feelings about Blink and Caution--what worked, what didn't, and why. Spoilers. Obviously.

A quick summary: Blink and Caution is a YA novel about two teenagers living on the streets of Toronto, alternating between Blink's 2nd person narration and Caution (Kitty's) 3rd person narration. The first half of the novel sets up why each character is on the streets (Blink because of an abusive stepfather, Caution because she believes herself to be a murderer) without going too far into the details, which are revealed through flashbacks throughout the novel. As the story opens, Blink accidentally witnesses a CEO of an energy corporation faking his own kidnapping. After Blink acquires the CEO's phone, he becomes drawn into the mystery, with the realization that he is the only one who knows what really happened. Meanwhile, Caution decides to run away from her abusive, cheating, thirty-something drug dealer boyfriend--after stealing about $6,000 from him. Caution avoids Merlin (the BF) with the help of her cousin, and Blink connects with the daughter of the missing CEO, until the two meet on a train and their stories intertwine.

What Didn't Work: 

The First Half of the Story.
If the set-up I just described sounds like Strangers on a Train, that's because it is: Blink and Caution meet on a train, begin sharing some of their problems, and plan to help each other come up with a solution. The problem is, imagine if Strangers on a Train had about 90 minutes of film before Guy and Bruce actually meet, going into depth about their backstories, revealing information that ultimately had no connection to the movie's main plot. Blink and Caution could easily have started when the two meet on the train; instead, the reader is treated to about 250 pages (on iBooks, anyways) of details about Blink and Caution's lives that ultimately have little to do with the second half of the story. The set up dragged the novel down, and it almost felt as if I was reading two different books: one about two characters living (separately) on the mean streets of Toronto, struggling to survive, and the other about two teens who decide to solve a mystery and end up on a road trip where they learn more about themselves, grow as people, etc., etc., etc. As a writer, I wanted to scream, "WHERE WAS YOUR EDITOR?!?" This book was a huge violation of Kurt Vonnegut's rule about writing: 'Start as close to the end as possible.' This book felt like going to a crab fest, only to be served pasta, steak, and potatoes before the crabs and Old Bay show up.

Disappearing Plot Points.
This is a HUGE pet peeve of mine when I'm reading, so I'm probably harping on it more than necessary, but this book had so many little plots that were raised and then never resolved or even mentioned again that it made me want to take a red pen and cross out massive chunks of text. (This would have been an especially bad idea because I was reading it on my ipad : ) On the very first page, we learn that Blink is sneaking into a hotel to steal food off of a room service tray. Several times it is mentioned that he is so hungry he is dizzy, on the verge of collapse, struggling to concentrate, etc., but then he proceeds to NOT eat for the next forty pages/several hours, despite several opportunities to do so. At one point he is alone in a hotel room, with a full breakfast, and instead he decides to contemplate a picture he finds in the room, and then leaves without eating anything! He then acquires a few hundred dollars, and STILL wanders around for a while before buying anything to eat. I wouldn't have carried if the author hadn't harped on it so much, but the first thing I learned about this character was that he was basically starving, and then he kept not eating despite ample opportunity.

The eating, however, pales in comparison to a much, much bigger dropped plot point: one of the reasons Caution leaves Merlin (abusive BF) is because she realizes that he has made and sold a sex tape of the two of them. To be clear: Caution is 16. This is child pornography. She realizes this is child pornography. She also realizes that some of Merlin's associates have seen the film. But other than destroying the hard copy in Merlin's apartment, we never hear about the film again, even when Merlin and the previously mentioned associates are out hunting for Caution. Aside from the horror of the film's mere existence, why wasn't Caution concerned that all of the members of this drug cartel know what she looks like? Well, that brings me to the biggest dropped plot point of all: Once Caution meets up with Blink, Merlin and the others apparently just stop looking for her and decide they don't care about the disappearance of $6,000. The whole reason Caution is on the train is to avoid Merlin, but after solving the mystery of the CEO, they head back to Toronto, unconcerned about the drug cartel, who, sure enough, never make another appearance in the novel. It's even mentioned that the $6,000 is put in a college fund for Caution, at which point I think I actually laughed at the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

The Disney Ending.
Here's the thing: I love happy endings. I hate downer endings. And this ending was too happy for even me. Blink moves in with his grandmother, who is thrilled to have him, and basically takes him in as soon as he shows up on her doorstep without a single question (such as: why didn't your mother report you missing?) and Caution is reunited with her family, who all love her, are thrilled to have her back, etc. (Later I'll address Caution's growth as a character in more detail, because it was probably the best part of the novel.) The problem with Caution's happy, loving family is it makes her guilt over the 'murder' seem overblown. The worst part, though, was that Blink and Caution are apparently dating, even though there was zero hint of a romantic bond between them before the epilogue. In fairness, they do kiss once, but it's more of a 'thank god we're alive/we just shared a deep emotional experience' type kiss than a romantic one. I thought Wynne-Jones had established that Caution viewed Blink like a kid brother who needed looking after, which was a neat piece of literary symmetry given that Caution lost her older brother, who always looked out for her, but then at the last moment they are apparently dating, because the whole ending wasn't convenient enough already.

Blink's ADHD/Panic Disorder/Schizophrenia/Whatever 
This could have gone under the tag of dropped plot points, but it was so annoying I thought it deserved its own section. From the beginning, it's very clear there is something wrong with Blink: he freezes up, forgets what he's doing/saying, struggles to keep a grip on what's going on around him, and has a mental companion he calls Captain Panic who comes out and yells at him whenever things are going wrong. It doesn't seem like Blink thinks Captain Panic is an actual person speaking to him, which means it's probably not schizophrenia, but there is something wrong with Blink--until suddenly there isn't any more. Even if it's just crippling anxiety (at one point he finds himself struggling to speak during a phone conversation, forcing each word out past the panic/confusion) it should still have been addressed, especially since it's implied that this is part of the reason Blink's stepfather abused him and his mother ignored him. At one point Blink mentally shoves down Captain Panic and seems to triumph over him, but other than that one moment his illness is never addressed and, like the drug cartel, simply disappears at the end. If the author hadn't gone to such lengths to make it clear that Blink had some kind of mental illness this probably wouldn't be bothering me so much, but he did, and then just dropped it, to which I can only say: ugh.

What Did Work 

Showing Not Telling 
In general, Tim Wynne-Jones is very good at showing instead of telling, letting the audience come to natural conclusions about how Blink and Caution feel at significant turning points in the story instead of laying it out for the reader. Two moments in particular come to mind: after speaking to the CEO's daughter, Alison, Blink has to decide whether to call her back and explain what he saw or to stay uninvolved. He works up the courage to reach out to her instead of waiting for her to call, which is the first proactive action we see him take. We understand what a big deal it is for him to come out of his shell and reach out to another person without Tim Wynne-Jones hitting us over the head with it. The other moment comes when Caution discovers that Merlin has been cheating on her and makes the decision to leave him. Her battle to open the metal horse and access his money requires forethought and physical strength, and it quickly becomes clear that this is the first thing she has fought for in a long time. Although the wordplay becomes overdone at times, this story is an excellent example of letting characters' actions and words speak for them instead of the author explaining each emotional note s/he is trying to hit.

The Character Development  
Despite the Disney ending and the tacked on romance, Blink and Caution contains excellent character development, running the main characters on first parallel and then intersecting journeys to discover their own self worth and ultimately decide to reach out and trust others. Aside from living on the streets, Blink and Caution are ordinary teenagers--they want to be accepted but fear appearing vulnerable, they distrust adults and dislike being belittled, and they use attitude and sarcasm to cover their fear and uncertainty. During the story Blink and Caution grow from teenagers into adults, at least on an emotional level. Each becomes confident in who they are, but at the same time they aren't afraid to trust and reach out for others. The biggest change between the first and second half of the story is that Blink and Caution go from reactive to proactive. Both understanding that actions have consequences, but perhaps the biggest lesson for both is that those consequences should be faced head on instead of avoided, and each has the right to make decisions about who they are and how they deserve to be treated.

Caution's MOA (Moment of Awesome)
The best part of Blink and Caution, the part that tips this book from the trash heap to the recommend pile, is the moment when Caution not only faces down her demons, but seizes control and makes them work for her. The reason she ran away from home, the reason she hooked up with and stayed with an abusive drug dealer, is because she feels the need to punish herself for accidentally shooting and killing her brother. Spencer was Caution's world, and in addition to looking out for her and being her best friend, he also taught her to shoot. At the climax of the novel, Blink is locked in a cabin with a man (Tank) who wants to torture and possibly murder him. Caution uses her knowledge of the woods (also taught by her brother) to effectively block Tank from chasing them or communicating with his friends. And then she grabs a shotgun and threatens Tank until he lets Blink go. Not only does she grab a shotgun, but she demonstrates her skills as a shooter, terrifying Tank into obeying her every command. The entire time, Caution wants to drop the gun and run screaming from the situation, but she maintains her cool and rescues herself and Blink, only to completely melt down after they escape. I wanted to stand up and cheer when Tank said she didn't have the guts to pull the trigger and she blew away the lamp next to his head. From that moment, Caution finally releases all the pain and anger she's kept inside and allows herself to feel, and, by extension, return to her family. The brilliance of the writing cannot be overstated here: the reader feels every ounce of Caution's fear and panic at holding a shotgun, and every ounce of her courage and determination to save her friend. The Strange Familiar said it best: "Courage is when you've lost your way but you find your strength anyways."

That's my thoughts in a nutshell. Again, I would recommend reading Blink and Caution, especially if you enjoy strong writing, but I'd also say that skimming a bit in the first half wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. And if you do pick it up, give yourself at least 30-40 pages before you put it down--Blink's 2nd person narration, coupled with his mental struggles, make the book VERY confusing and difficult to read, until you get used to his way of thinking and seeing the world. Ultimately though, I think it's worth it. Best book ever? Nah. Worth a read? Definitely.

--Cates

P.S One final thing I decided to not include in the actual review: I appreciated that Tim Wynne-Jones did not use Caution's story as a way to preach about the evils of firearms. Personal opinions aside, it just wouldn't have belonged and would have taken away from Caution's character development. In the Afterwords, Wynne-Jones reveals that his best friend was shot and killed by his younger brother in a freak accident, and the emotional fall-out for everyone involved was his initial inspiration to write Blink and Caution. I thought it was a great decision to focus on the characters and to keep politics out.

If You Are a Non-Conformist, Copy and Paste This Into Your Profile

The first time I saw Alice Dorset, she was thumping her way across the music room of our school, lugging a saxophone case bigger than she was, wearing her (knee-length) kilt hemmed so long it fell almost to her ankles, and muttering fluently to herself in what I later learned was Arabic.  Insecure little middle-schooler that I was, I was naturally terrified out of my mind.  Here was someone of my own age group that was so aggressively quirky that she didn’t even have an L.L. Bean backpack.  Not only that, but there was not a scrap of North Face anywhere on her person.  As I rapidly learned, these were sins unforgivable to a certain select group of girls in our class, which made a point of ignoring her or teasing her; the rest of the grade just tried not to get involved, in case she really did bite like the rumors said. 

 I’d love to say that my best friend and I fell in platonic love at first sight and hit it off from the start, that we discovered we had a great deal in common in our first conversation and that night we became blood brothers.  Not so.  I only sought out Alice and tried to become her friend specifically because I had declared private war on that one particular select group of girls, and I figured that this was a soldier I could easily convert to my cause.  To my frustration and annoyance, the quiet submissive weird Alice refused to be dominated by me, and utterly refused to become like me.  I am relieved and happy to say that through nearly continuous exposure to her over the seven years of middle and high school and as many visits as we can swing while in college, I have become something like her. 

By far the single most important thing that Alice taught me was how to love being young, how to love being alive, and how to love being a part of our own generation.  At the time when we met, I was a snarky, rebellious little seventh grader with an artistically ripped-up uniform and Sharpie-colored nails, heavy eyeliner and a loud mouth, illegal black-spiked jewelry and an ugly attitude, my half-inch of hair gelled into aggressive spikes that sent my message to the world: Don’t touch me.  Don’t come near me.  I scorned popular bands as cheap and passé, I dismissed activists as sob-story moralizers, I whined loudly and often about the utter injustice of having to attend school, having to go to class, having to listen to the evil propaganda passed down by the administration to try and make us into automatons.  I made it a personal point of pride to lambast High School Musical in every conversation I ever had—never mind that I’d never even seen the film and therefore had no grounds to comment on it at all.  I hated everything so loudly and vehemently that I forgot to like things as well.  I read classical books that bored me to tears so that I could loftily dismiss people’s questions about popular literature with the excuse that I was reading real material and had little time for such things as Clique or Pride and Prejudice.  I sloughed though Stephen King novels that disgusted and horrified me just so that I could shock people by carrying them around.  I must have been quite a sight, a tiny four-foot six-inch twelve-year-old with ballpoint tattoos and a cinderblock-sized copy of Christine tucked under one arm.   

Well, I think you know where this story is going.  Because Miss Giant Saxophone and Schizophrenic Muttering didn’t give a crap about any of that.  I had all the show and glam of being a nonconformist, but Alice Dorset was the genuine article.  She listened to bands I’d never heard of—and accompanied them with the soundtrack to Rent.  She wore pink because (heaven forbid) she liked the color, not because it was what a person was supposed to wear—or not.  She was familiar with a lot of the popular trends in our class, and chose to reject them or conform to them by turns, depending on what she herself thought.  Not what anyone else was supposed to think of her; it was entirely possible for her to love both Gossip Girl and Twin Peaks, all at once.  She taught me how to stop being afraid to love things, how to listen to music and read books that would earn me scorn or approval and how to take both in equal measure.  It was Stravinsky and Britney Spears, Ernest Hemingway and Jodi Piccoult, and it was perfect. 

I knew I was way, way too cool in our class to hang around with the likes of her, but the truth was that she was far too cool for the likes of me.  It’s because she loved being in our generation.  She was a terrible influence on my individualism, to say the least.  By the time we were powering through tenth grade together, I had let my hair go dirty-blond and curly, I didn’t bother with make-up because it was easier without, and I wildly, joyfully read the books that were popular, saw the films that Hollywood prepackaged, and listened to music that had nothing to do with deep inner pain or raging against the fascist regime.  Worst of all, I admitted that I genuinely liked reading and writing in English and American History class and doing experiments in Biology and even (heaven forbid) learning new concepts in Trigonometry. 

What I realized along the way is that I love being young, I love being stupid (Or is it that I love being smart?), and I love finding things to love.  It didn’t matter that Linkin Park was a bunch of whiny white boys—their instrumental harmonies kicked ass.  Maybe cartoons were for babies—but if that was true than our brilliantly artistic baby shows trump our overdone melodramatic adult shows any day.  I read every single Harry Potter book and cheered for Team Ginny the entire way.  I actually watched High School Musical—and discovered I still hated it.  I dared to admit to myself that I actually liked music by Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson.  I even tried watching American Idol—and hated that too, and so dropped it because I could.  It may be stupid of me, but I love my own generation dearly.  Someday I want to say to my kids, I was a Potter Girl.  I was a Little Monster.  I was an otaku.  I was a Twi-tard, God damn it, and I was proud of that fact no matter how many people tried to tell me I should be ashamed of myself for wanting to enjoy a popular series of novels. 

That is one thing that I think this generation could use a little less of: disapproval.  You can’t mention Mahatma Gandhi’s groundbreaking peaceful revolution without someone piping up that he refused his wife painkillers for religious reasons.  It was with vindictive joy that the world found out that Mother Teresa occasionally doubted God just like every single other human being on the planet.  Every single American president, every folk hero, every great writer or artist or any person that ever achieved the tiniest measure of fame has a whole laundry list of grievances that the world holds against them, and these are what we hear when their names come up.  No one talks about how President Clinton raised the standard of living for the entire two-hundred-million-person nation, but “Monika Lewinski” is a household name.  You can’t compliment Pope John Paul for giving over half of the money of the entire Catholic Church to humanitarian aid while essentially ending homophobia for the single largest centrally organized religion in the entire world without someone digging out the fact that eight centuries ago one of his predecessors approved the killing of “infidels.” 

So what if Stephenie Meyer can’t write as well as, say, J.K. Rowling?   Does that mean that we should start yelling at ten-year-old kids when they admit to liking her books?  Maybe Bill Gates lives in a mansion and pollutes the atmosphere, but anyone who hasn’t given three billion dollars to AIDS relief can just shut the hell up about him.  Lady Gaga is a sell-out of the highest order—but then so is every single artist ever to make it onto an MP3 player.  And she teaches young girls that they can be freaks if they so desire, while cheerfully conforming to or rejecting the standards of Madonna and Freddy Mercury.  That’s what Alice is as well, because she didn’t stand against anything, because she was too busy standing for gay rights and free market ideals, pro-life laws and anti-death-penalty ones as well.  I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer long after vampires were so last year, and Avatar the Last Airbender when I was a full decade above the target audience’s age. 

If you’re wondering who those rabid fan girls are who scream themselves hoarse at rock concerts and weird conventions, you’re looking at one of them.  The door to my room has a “Hipster and proud!” bumper sticker because I love the paradox.  I own tee-shirts declaring my love for Fight Club, for The Hunger Games, for The Who and Guns ‘N Roses, for The Bridger Chronicles and Death Note.  For the past four years I’ve attended the largest anime and manga convention on the entire east coast; last year I even participated in a fan panel on Axis Powers Hetalia.  I attracted stares walking around downtown Baltimore dressed all in black with two broadswords strapped across my back, a hand-drawn blue and white demon mask on my head, and an enormous red and brown flame painted across most of the left side of my face, but I loved every moment of it. 

Perhaps our generation has its standards set too high.  We are the children of the flower children, the reaction decade of the reaction decade of the reaction decade of the 1960s.  From our aging-hippie parents we learned to hope for a perfect world filled with perfect people, and to scorn anything short of that.  We learned from middle-aged white-collar suburbanites who were married-with-kids never to trust anyone over thirty, that there was no need to live in organized society, that monogamy was a restriction on true love, that contraceptives would save the world, that being your own person was the most important thing.  Best of all, we get to watch Vietnam happen all over again in Afghanistan, as people scream at each other on the news and reveal that still not enough has changed when it comes to women and minorities and gays and the poor, because it’s all still happening.  Is it any wonder that we grew up cynical, in the wreckage and ruin and tattoo regret and lingering drug addictions that came from the joyously rebellious sixties?  I conformed to that attitude for two long, and then I found out that life is too short not to love something about everything. 

Either way, Alice was there to quash my inner rebel, to teach me how to let my eyes adjust rather than curse the damn dark.  I was a forty-something in the body of a twelve-year-old; nowadays, I’m a twelve-year-old that just happens to look nineteen.  She taught me frivolity, and carelessness.  She taught me to channel my inner genius towards fan fiction and cosplay rather than just Charles Dickens and world domination.  She taught me to ignore the bad and look for the good; maybe the world isn’t perfect, but that’s why we protest about it.  Maybe people shouldn’t do the things they do, in which case we should all stop bitching and start throwing flowers instead.  Here’s to you, Alice Dorset, for making me nothing like you, and nothing like anyone else either.    

Kyoya Ootori said it best: “You’re an idiot if you think that a little capriciousness ever harmed a truly serious man.  I wouldn’t be who I was if I didn’t know a few incredible pointless people.”  And to think.  I wouldn’t even know who Kyoya Ootori was if not for Alice. 

Note: Alice’s real name has been slightly altered for the purpose of this blog post.

Links to Resources for Writers

Trickster in a Suit of Lights (explaining the importance of building stories on stories)

On Fairy Stories (suspending disbelief) by J.R.R. Tolkien

Michael Chabon on Fan Fiction

The psychology of how stories change minds

How to write a novel-length story in just one month

Ridiculous character generator

Ridiculous plot generator 

Showing not telling

How to understand a Mary Sue

... and how to avoid one.

How to know your own characters

Write or Die

The importance of content warnings

When looking for a word

Archetype Wiki

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Phenomenal Women

I loved The Avengers. Let's start there. I was skeptical going in, because I didn't see how having that many superheroes in one movie could possibly result in anything but a mad mixture of endless fight scenes interspersed with dialogue heavy scenes meant to summarize the plot, but luckily I was wrong. Hiring Joss Whedon (he of Buffy, Firefly, and Toy Story fame) to write and direct was possibly the smartest decision they could have made.

However, I loved The Avengers in spite of a glaring problem I had with the storyline. It's not an overcomplicated plot twist or an unrealistic character motivation. It's a lot simpler than that. In fact, it's obvious without ever seeing the movie. All you need to do is look at a movie poster. Notice how there's only one woman? Notice how many bloggers and critics and fans didn't notice? Yeah. That would be the problem right there.

I had a long discussion with Buggy about whether or not it was fair to accuse The Avengers of being sexist for only including Black Widow when there weren't that many female superheroes they could have picked in the first place. Sexist is a big word, and to be honest I'm not comfortable applying it to the way I feel about The Avengers. Instead, I think The Avengers is an example of a larger problem that exists in popular fiction, television, and especially Hollywood: the Strong Woman has become the Token Black Character. There's one in every story, but only one, and her personality can usually be boiled down to being 'tough.' It's fantastic that there are female superheroes, and doctors, and police officers, and scientists, etc. That's a huge step forward that a lot of people fought for a long time to achieve. But we've made that step, and now it seems like we've stalled. Would it be too much to ask for us to keep walking?

Strong Women Are Everywhere
Think about your own life. Think about the women you know. Is there only one or two who you'd call strong--independent, smart, capable? Unless you live in a black hole, the answer's no. In ten seconds I could name ten women I know personally or who are well know figures who are strong. Give me a minute, and I'll give you fifty. Madeline Albright. Isabel Allende. J.K Rowling. Aung Suu Kyi. Sandra Day O'Conor. Emma Thompson. Margaret Thatcher. Lady GaGa. Angelina Jolie. Cat Cora. Hillary Clinton. Sarah Palin. Hope Solo. Gabby Douglas. Malala Yousufzai. Beyonce. Love them or hate them, it's impossible to deny that each of these women is strong, intelligent, and talented in a way that has nothing to do with good looks. Strong women are everywhere--so why does fiction have such a hard time mirroring reality?

To me, the best example of a story with truly strong women is J.D. Robb's Eve Dallas books. What makes these stories so fantastic in their representation of women is Robb doesn't create Eve, a lieutenant with the NYPSD, in a vacuum. She doesn't make one or two strong women and call it a day, and, more importantly, she doesn't make strong women seem like anything out of the ordinary. The Eve Dallas stories are full of strong women. Within the main cast of a dozen or so recurring characters, roughly half are women. Half. Think about how strange that seems for a second. Try and list as many movies, books, and television shows where that's the case. Now, in how many of those stories are all the women capable and talented? How many cases are the women independent characters in and of themselves--they don't simply serve as 'the love interest' or 'the obstacle in the relationship?' The number I can come up with is depressingly small: Animorphs, Bones, The Descent, Rizzoli and Isles, The Circle of Magic, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and of course Eve Dallas.

What really makes the Eve Dallas stories special, however, is that there are an equal number of strong women present in the minor and supporting characters. Whether it's victims' families, other police officers, lawyers, witnesses, etc, there are constant appearances and mentions of women who hold leadership positions, demonstrate their intelligence, and show strength and independence. Of the stories I mentioned above, only Circle of Magic passes that test. We need stories that are filled with strong women--which doesn't mean replace the men with women. Real life is full of strong men and women. Is it too much to ask that fiction live up to the same standard?

A Woman Doesn't Need to Swing a Sword to be Strong
I love Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness series. First published in 1983, Alanna: The First Adventure introduced the world to a stubborn, thick headed, passionate and tough young girl named Alanna, who dreamed of being a knight in a world where only men could earn the title. Alanna was a tough and strong female character in an era where tough and strong female characters were practically nonexistent.

That was thirty years ago.

Alanna embodies an important step in the struggle for strong women in stories. She entered a man's world, defied stereotypes, fought for her dream, showed that a woman could be just as strong as a man, and scoffed at anyone who dared try and stop her. Alanna's journey mirrored the struggle that many women in the real world were fighting at the same time: the struggle to earn respect as scientists, politicians, sports players, etc. But, like Alanna, that struggle has essentially been conquered. It's time to take the next step, but writers, directors, and producers seem unable or unwilling to make the start.

Within the main cast of the Eve Dallas books, the strong women include a therapist, an MD, an ADA, multiple police officers, and a rock star. Eve herself hates the idea of shopping, finds fancy clothes a mystery, and actively avoids cooking and cleaning. In many ways, Eve embodies the 80s idea of what a strong woman looked like.

But this is 2012, not 1983. Strong women come in all shapes and sizes. As they do in the Eve Dallas books, they can love or abhor shopping. They can literally kick ass, or they can be intelligent and wise. They can gush over boys AND take down a perp with a handgun and a pocket full of cocaine. They can cry over sad movies and scream profanities at pushy cab drivers. They can love to sing and dance, or they can love playing soccer in the park, or--shocking!--they can love both.

Scarlett Johansen's Black Widow is an awesome character. But she falls into the same pattern that every strong woman seems to fall into today: she is a woman in a man's world. She is tough and aloof--no feminine weakness for her. She can literally kick your ass and she shows little emotion while doing so. She is serious and does not engage in bickering and jokes with the men on the team--she's above all that.

Women are strong and talented in a multitude of ways--there's no single image of a strong woman. Rosie the Riveter has passed the torch to chefs and artists, leaders and athletes, warriors and doctors. Rosie played her part, as did Alanna. It seems a shame that we can't continue the fight and fill our stories with phenomenal women of all shapes and sizes.

Now It's Personal
There's one final issue I'd like to address, and it's a point where even the Eve Dallas books, even the works of Tamora Pierce, falls down.

I have an awesome younger sister. She's at the top of my list of phenomenal women. She's no Primrose Everdeen--the thought of her as shrinking and shy is hysterical. If I ever tried to pull a move like Katniss and offer myself up to protect her, she'd tackle me into the dirt before the words left my mouth and call me an overprotective idiot. That being said, I'd still try, because I'd do anything for her, and she'd do anything for me.

The list of strong brotherly relationships goes back to literally the dawn of storytelling. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest existing story, deals with the relationship between two men who, while not born brothers, become brothers to each other with all the relationship implies: camraderie, protectiveness, support, trust, competition, love. Moving through time, the examples are endless: Hector and Paris in The Iliad. Jacob and Easu, Jonathan and David, Moses and Aron in the Bible. Caleb and Aaron in East of Eden. The Brothers Karamazov. Death of a Salesman.

Five years ago, there were three different television dramas that featured a pair of brothers: Supernatural, Numb3rs, and Prison Break. And that's only counting shows where the brothers are genetically related, not shows that feature bromances like Psych, Scrubs, and Rescue Me. Two years ago Rizzoli and Isles premiered, and it was treated like a big deal because it featured two female leads and the relationship between them.

I've already questioned why the strong women seem to be missing from much of television, movies, and popular fiction. Here's my personal bone to pick: where are all the sisters? I can't believe--in fact I know for certain--that mine and my sister's relationship is unique. Of the women I know who have sisters, many speak about the relationship as the most important one in their lives. So where are the stories that reflect what it means--what it truly means--to be sisters? We should have left the fairytales and stories such as King Lear behind a long time ago. But all too often, when a show or book does feature sisters, one is given prominence while the other is merely an obstacle or a competitor or an annoyance or an object to be protected.

I'll finish with a quote by Barbara Alpert: “Sister. She is your mirror, shining back at you with a world of possibilities. She is your witness, who sees you at your worst and best, and loves you anyway. She is your partner in crime, your midnight companion, someone who knows when you are smiling, even in the dark. She is your teacher, your defense attorney, your personal press agent, even your shrink. Some days, she's the reason you wish you were an only child.” 

Reading it over, it really seems a shame to me that there aren't more stories about sisters, because of all the rich possibilities that exist in such a relationship. We need stories that show women as they truly are, not as we've idealized them to be. Women who are sarcastic, smart, reserved, bubbly, amusing, quick-witted, practical, and foolish, wild dreamers and level headed planners. And we need to see women interacting with other women--not as rivals, but as equals. Not as the strong woman who stands out alone, but as sisters who fight and laugh and argue and defend with and for one another.

--Cates

How to Un-Mary Your Sue: A Few Basic Tips

Before I begin: for those of you that don’t know, the definition of “Mary Sue” I will be using throughout this blog post is that of a character who is insufficiently flawed or complex to be relatable for readers.  I use the term to refer to characters of both genders, because it doesn’t actually matter that it’s a woman’s name, considering the concept refers to a hypothetical construct and no one is actually named “Mary Sue” anymore these days.

I was recently reading through the famous and thoroughly praised (with good reason) Mary Sue Litmus Test, the original online measurement of whether or not one’s character was a dreaded Mary Sue.  I realized that while that particular test was both groundbreaking and eye-opening at the time when it came out a whopping seven years ago, it is already somewhat dated simply because people are so aware of it in online writing communities these days.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s still a great way for beginning writers to avoid some of the most common mistakes.  (For instance, it never even occurred to me the ways in which I would sometimes go out of my way to prove my one borderline-Sue character right until I saw them staring me in the face on that test.)  However, there is a lot more to a Mary Sue than just perfect beauty and infinite talent in everything and color-changing eyes as a mark of her half-vampire status. 

Frankly, the Mary Sue Litmus Test got too famous for its own good; nowadays the dreaded Mary Sue label is bandied around in writers’ forums and fan-fiction sites the way that Adolph Hitler comes up in vitriol-filled discussion boards.  Any character who has an unusual name, hair or eye color, or degree of talent in any area is branded with this (extremely hurtful) moniker by readers and dismissed to rot in the scrap heap.  On the flip side, amateur writers often think that so long as they take their otherwise unflawed character and give her an unflattering mole or an awkward phobia they somehow magically dodged that bullet and they are completely free of any sort of Mary Sue-dom.  All of this, whether people realize it or not, tends to come from relying on the Mary Sue Litmus Test as the be-all end-all authority on depth of character, when the creators themselves warn all over the test that it is at best a somewhat flawed starting point.

To give a somewhat amusing example, I recently ran real-life actor Jensen Ackles through the Mary Sue Litmus Test and it informed me that the actor/singer/director/model/amateur pilot with the startlingly green eyes and the creative intelligence balanced by devotion to his family and to helping charitable causes was a highly unrealistic flight of fancy that could not possibly exist in real life.  Similarly, people slap the Mary Sue label on Edward Cullen all the time and accuse him of being an unrealistic, underdeveloped character—and yet he squeaks by the Litmus Test with a passing grade.  I think that the problem is that people have started too often defining Mary Sues by the presence of certain traits (such as extreme beauty) when the original definition of the term referred to the absence of other traits (such as serious character failings).  And frankly the original definition is more useful for writers as a whole; readers the world over tend to be more concerned with whether a character is sufficiently complex than with whether a character doesn’t have more than three talents.  This is my own highly inexperienced, deeply biased, thoroughly self-congratulatory attempt to offer a little advice about how to get away from Mary Sue-dom.

Don’t mistake quirks for traits.  This one is an enormous pet-peeve of mine, most especially because it’s becoming a huge, whopping, deeply unfortunate trend throughout much of modern fiction.  For instance, a character who memorizes trivia about U.S. presidents has a quirk, not a trait.  A character who memorizes trivia about U.S. presidents because she tends to be socially awkward and spouts these facts as a way to fill gaps in conversation has a trait.  Dying one’s hair a different color every week is a quirk.  Doing it specifically as a way to test the boundaries of authority out of a desire to risk punishment is a trait.  It’s perfectly fine to give a character quirks (so long as you don’t go overboard), but you have to make those quirks say something about the person, or have a very clear origin somewhere in that person’s psyche, or else they’re just window-dressing for hollow dolls.

Similarly, don’t mistake demographic information for traits. Whereas I find the quirks-as-traits problem annoying, this one I find downright offensive.  Mental illness is not a character trait.  Homosexuality is not a character trait.  Judaism is not a character trait.  You can make your character a mildly depressed Jewish lesbian, but that won’t tell the reader anything about her personality unless you show her responding to her depression with strength or with humor or with bitterness, or have a moment where she struggles to reconcile her beliefs if her community doesn’t approve of homosexuality, or something like that.  No character can just be The Gay Friend or The Crazy Woman; it’s an insult to anyone who happens to be from that demographic characteristic to classify people just on their outward social labels.  One other one that drives me nuts: wealth is not a character trait.  How people use wealth can say a lot about them, but “wealthy successful straight Christian white male” can be just as much of a gross stereotype as anything else.

Put life on every planet; don’t just let space-junk satellites circle the sun. Okay, what I mean by that is the fact that (as someone who I can’t seem to find to credit once said), we are all the heroes of our own stories.  This is a bigger problem in fan fiction than original fiction—too often the characters and settings of someone else’s story are hijacked to exist as worshipful slaves for a single divine Mary Sue who descends from above to solve all their problems.  Even if you’re telling a story that takes place with an extremely tight first-person point of view or even entirely inside a character’s head (and I’ll save my feelings on that one for an angry blog post on offensive clichés that just won’t die), even the minor characters have to have their own lives.  It’s not enough just to get inside your protagonist’s head; you have to get inside the heads of all the characters that appear in your story.  Why is your villain acting the way she is?  How does your character’s father feel about her actions?  What is the best friend’s motivation for helping out the main character?  Often authors make the mistake of pouring all their love and devotion into the creation of a single brilliant character and then let everyone else circle around vaguely, having no life and no motivation outside of either helping or hindering the hero of the story.

Self-inserts, when done correctly, are actually okay.  One bit of inadvertent harm I think the Litmus Test has done the art of characterization is creating a somewhat unnecessary fear of basing characters too closely on oneself.  I’m more a fan of the “write what you know” school of thought, mostly because if I find a writer writing about something I know but that writer clearly doesn’t (being a girl dressed as a boy and growing up on the road are the two that I see most often), I tend to waver between being amused and being exasperated, but either way I don’t appreciate the story.  Obviously a word-for-word rendering of your own life story isn’t fiction at all, and a self-portrait with all the flaws omitted is worse still, but don’t be afraid of yourself.  Something Janet Burroway said (see, I remembered that source!) is that the best way to balance the familiar and the unfamiliar is to start with something totally foreign to yourself and then to fill in all the details with what you already know.  For instance, I was writing about an immortal traveler living in Belfast during the Irish Civil War, which was pretty damn distant for me, but when I needed to give him a job I had him work in the same type of industry I’m in, and when it came to interests I had him listen to my favorite music.  That way I could write with authority about at least some aspects of his life.  There’s really no need to make every single aspect of your character completely different from yourself; start with something different but don’t be afraid to plumb your own experiences for information when it comes to filling in all the gritty details.

Don’t try this at home: creating the Westley is not for the faint of heart (but worth a shot nonetheless). For those of you not familiar with TV tropes (the greatest website of all time), the term “Westley” comes from the main love interest of the book (and movie) The Princess Bride.  Westley has all the trappings of a Mary Sue: he’s unusually beautiful, incredibly smart, very strong, and has dozens of skills in everything from sword-fighting to storming castles.  And yet, whether or not he’s a Mary Sue, he is beloved.  No one accuses him of being a poorly developed or too-perfect character because the author successfully makes him well-rounded and relatable despite his infinite virtues.  The reader clearly understands his noble motivations, and he runs around as this larger-than-life tongue-in-cheek hero.  I would encourage everyone to strive for the Westley.  Not necessarily by giving their characters a million and one talents and making them the best at everything like he is, but by showing those talents in a ridiculous, self-mocking way that acknowledges the silliness of certain tropes, and by always giving the character concrete, clear reasons for possessing those traits or talents.  Westley has heart, soul, and character, and we can therefore forgive him for being too perfect to be real.  I encourage you to see if you can’t get the reader to forgive your character his virtues through making him intensely relatable and very logically formed. 

Every virtue—and every flaw—is almost always a double-edged sword. It’s very important to show how your character’s virtues can be flaws in the wrong situation.  To illustrate this, I refer to J.K. Rowling, who must have done something right considering an estimated 45% of the population of the planet found her characters at least tolerable enough to sit through over 5,000 pages’ worth of her writing.  Luna Lovegood has the potential to be the dreaded Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a subset of the Mary Sue that primarily consists of a girl who is aggressively quirky and perfect, and yet Luna is not, mostly because there are distinct, measurable drawbacks to her quirkiness.  Luna is unique to a fault—and as a result is so off-putting that she is often bullied by her classmates.  Though bullying is never okay, the reader understands why people would pick on her; her quirkiness makes her bizarre and hard to talk to.  Albus Dumbledore also has the potential to be a Mary Sue because of his vast wisdom, and yet Rowling easily dodges that bullet by showing that wisdom has made Dumbledore arrogant and often even manipulative because he tends to think so little of the people who are less experienced than he is.  The characters’ virtues—quirkiness, intelligence—lead logically to their flaws—social awkwardness, vanity.  Similarly, Ron’s biggest flaw—his ambition—becomes a virtue when he directs it toward helping Harry take down Voldemort, and Harry’s biggest flaw—his impulsiveness—continuously fluctuates between being a hindrance when dealing with difficult school situations and a help when battling Death Eaters.  There is no such thing as an absolute good quality; even imbuing your character with an excess one of the Cardinal Virtues can potentially be a downfall if, for instance, his great patience for others means he won’t confront people even when they are doing wrong. 

Make sure your traits make sense together. This one is sort of an addendum to the double-edged sword principle.  Your character’s virtues don’t have to be flaws and his flaws don’t have to be virtues, but having a character who is careless about her appearance and naturally very beautiful and insecure about her looks just doesn’t make sense.  Obviously most people are just born with some abilities, but let those abilities create your traits.  A character who is naturally very talented at sports might be chronically lazy because she never has to work hard to do well.  A socially awkward person might devote all her time to saving the world anyway.  Create balance through extrapolating naturally from the things your character does well to the things this very ability might cause her to fail at. 

Everyone has to laugh sometime.  Too often Mary Sues are absolutely dead serious about everything.  This is often because of a Terrible Past or else because of such Infinite Wisdom that the character doesn’t have time for trivial pursuits, and is often extremely off-putting.  Adding just a tiny bit of humor can go a very long way in emphasizing the core aspects of your character.  For instance, in the film of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when talking about the coming war with Peter, Aslan makes a veiled poke at his own omniscience.  Considering the quip is coming from freaking Aslan—he is God, after all—it’s surprising and delightful and makes a great contrast to everything else he says, which is generally dead serious.  Sometimes people do take themselves far too seriously, but that can be a character trait as well.  Don’t let even terrible sadness, when it must occur, prevent your character from smiling every so often as well.

Everyone has to cry sometime.  This is obviously the flip side of the same coin: no one has a perfect life, and in fact many people who are outwardly happy and composed are struggling with problems that would overwhelm many others.  A great way to make a lighthearted, witty character seem even more so is to show her breaking down and crying over a past relationship that ended badly, maybe, or a painful family situation, and then only a few hours later (or a few scenes later) once again bringing back that cheerful temperament.  I don’t mean that you have to have every single character in your entire book series spout witticisms left and right except when bursting into tears, but allowing a person’s mood to change will strengthen the readers’ impression of her core traits, not weaken it.  Let your characters reveal things about themselves they don’t want to. Let them get angry sometimes and be patient at others—find out what pushes their buttons.  In short, people often change a great deal from situation to situation, and a character will seem just as stock and cliché if she always reacts to both good news and bad with a single mood state as if she varies wildly in her temperament and intentions. 

That said, there’s a difference between character development and Invasion of the Body-Snatchers. Now, admittedly this is more of a problem in fan fiction than in original fiction, but it happens in original fiction as well.  This is the opposite of the everyone laughs/everyone cries problem: this is when a character, due to circumstance or time or plot developments, suffers from such extreme alterations of personality she is unrecognizable by the end.  Mary Sues too often start out irredeemably evil and suddenly suffer changes of heart that make them puppy-saving saints overnight.  It’s okay to have your character develop, to discover she was wrong about certain things, and to make an effort to change who she is.  But all of this should happen gradually, for clear-cut reasons, and in realistically small increments.  One great example of this is Eustace Scrubb from Voyage of the Dawn-Treader.  (The book, this time, not the movie.) Eustace dramatically changes over the course of the book, at least partially because he has the extraordinary experience of being turned into a dragon.  Before he’s moody, arrogant, and both unwilling and unable to adapt… And afterward he’s moody, tries to take other people’s opinions into question but often just goes with what he thinks is best anyway, and has adapted enough to Narnia that he then fails to adapt back to England once he returns.  Even though his behavior changes radically, his core traits do not.  He realizes his flaws and tries to account for them, but his flaws are still present, and though his virtues become more prominent they were there all along once you look for them; he learns to use his same traits in different ways without actually changing who he is. 

Know the canon. Again, this is obviously more relevant to fan fiction than to original fiction, but this can refer to knowing your own canon as well.  It may feel like you know your character very well—after all, you are her creator and her god—but inconsistencies are insidious, and they pop up even with characters you’ve been writing for years.  As Cates put it, learn to fear the Canon Sue, the character that ostensibly exists in the canon but has been altered in fan fiction to gain extra powers, be impossibly beautiful, or simply not have flaws.  As far as fan fiction goes, I’d recommend reading a few other people’s analyses of the characters you’re going to use—for instance, I had trouble putting into words how exactly Zuko changed over the course of Avatar the Last Airbender until I read of all things a Wikipedia article that phrased the process beautifully.  For original fiction, re-read yourself.  Just whatever you do, don’t try to force your characters to be a different way against their will, even if doing so would work better for the plot.  Such is the way to tears and cardboard-ness. 

There is such a thing as being too flawed.  Way too many of the just-starting-out writers I know try to get away from the horror of Mary Sue-dom by instead choosing to write about main characters who are so disgusting and irredeemable that they aren’t remotely appealing to read about.  Although there is plenty of space for the anti-hero in fiction—or even the anti-anti­-hero á la Dexter Morgan—the reader has to want to know more of this person’s story for some reason, and having a gross morally depraved character running around being gross and morally depraved without any sort of redeeming complexity is a major turn-off.  If your character is, say, a crime boss who kills puppies in his spare time, either give him a very good couple reasons for being the way he is—maybe he was pressured into the life by his parents, and he’s always hated puppies ever since one killed his hamster as a child—or else give him contrasting traits that make him ambiguous and complex.  Maybe he’s a clumsy but protective father, or he gives all the money he earns toward his ailing mother, or he is tortured at night by the fear he’s not a good person.  Maybe he’s an evil bastard through and through but he has a wicked sense of humor or is so delightfully clever in his schemes we love to watch him work anyway.  But the narration has to give the reader something to cling to about the character, or else there is really no point in continuing to read. 

Don’t lie. Most importantly, don’t lie to yourself.  The Mary Sue Litmus Test has a big warning up at the top that there is no point in taking the test if you’re going to fudge results or justify not clicking “yes” to traits you suspect your character might have, because you’re not going to get correct results if you do that.  Try and sit down with yourself and have a good, long talk about whether you’re being true to your gut about whether or not you have Mary Sues.  (I would, however, recommend against doing this out loud in public.)  If you do, it’s not the end of the world.  I happen to know of a whole list of things to try that will hopefully add some wrinkles to that cardboard perfection, written by this wonderful blogger Bug.  But this also means that you shouldn’t lie to your reader.  Don’t try to fix a Mary Sue by adding in a line in the narration about how she is temperamental, or whiny, or a bit of an airhead, and then never actually showing that trait.  And don’t try to edit your work selectively so that you only see how your character works well and not how she doesn’t.  Again, you’re lying. 

Have fun. I should clarify at this point that there is nothing morally wrong with Mary Sues.  They are just grossly unappealing, not crimes against humanity.  I think sometimes people agonize too much over creating absolutely flawlessly flawed characters in stories they never intend to publish.  Writing fiction serves no real practical purpose in the world, so if you want to have fun writing about an absolutely perfect person who goes around being perfect and never makes any mistakes, then by god go for it.  Just don’t expect anyone to read it or like it, which no one has to.  Conversely, if you find yourself slogging through the chore of finishing a story that has gotten out of hand or trying to reign in a character that you find yourself unable to relate to or like even though you created her, kill that sucker.  Considering the fact that making up stories exists purely for the purpose of being a combination of art and entertainment and should be the most entertainment of all for the creator, if you don’t like writing then don’t write.  Go out and be a doctor or a firefighter or a superhero instead.  Or go be a Mary Sue like Jensen Ackles.   

-Bug